In the Mission’s Clarion Alley, weathered tubs of paint fill the bed of Victoria Canby’s parked black Tacoma truck — or, as she calls it, her pony.
Canby, a Bay Area-based artist, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in Marin County. Before pursuing art full time, Canby worked in education, museums, community advocacy and for native nonprofits, all experiences that contributed to her current project.
Since 2023, Canby’s been working in Clarion Alley, where she painted her mural about Native plants, “We Grow Our Own Medicine for Interdimensional and Intertribal Healing.” Now, she’s at work on a new mural that explores the history of nuclear colonialism.
Canby is creating the mural in partnership with Kyoko Sato, an associate director of the program in science, technology and society at Stanford University. Before her brush made contact with any paint, Canby, with help from Sato, spent a year researching the history of atomic power to learn more about its effects on different communities.
Canby, who is Diné (Navajo), says that she and Sato, who is Japanese, have both seen their communities face repercussions from nuclear activities.
Together, they came up with imagery for a time map of communities around the world that have been harmed by nuclear facilities, bombs, dumping or tests.
At the center of the mural is the figure of a genie — who the Navajo call Nazo, or yellow monster — in front of an exploding atomic bomb.
Canby says that, once the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945, the world changed. Fingers coated in red paint, she points to each dot on the mural that marks a site affected since then: Congo, Nevada, Japan and at least 35 more.
“In general, a lot of people are not educated on what nuclear colonialism is, and how far it reaches into all of these different realms,” she said. “It embodies so many other issues: Water and ethics and morality and, like, do you know who is holding this power?”
Canby plans to have the mural finished in the next few months.
“What I’m hoping,” she said, “is that some of these tech bros who are hanging out down here will maybe walk by, and have two seconds to scan my QR code and get the story, and see the correlation.”
